Generating Preventive Maintenance Work Orders

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Once you have specified task information for your equipment and spaces, you can have MainBoss automatically generate work orders based on those tasks.

Important: MainBoss does not generate preventive maintenance work orders until you tell it to do so! For example, you might tell MainBoss to generate preventive maintenance work orders for the next week; MainBoss will then figure out what jobs need to be done in that week and will generate the necessary work orders. However, the work orders are not created until you explicitly tell MainBoss to generate them.

By default, MainBoss is set up to generate work orders on a weekly basis. You can set a different schedule if you prefer. There are two general ways of doing this:

The MainBoss administrator can change the default using the Administration menu. For example, you can change the defaults so that MainBoss normally generates work orders every two weeks rather than every one week. For more about changing MainBoss defaults, see MainBoss Administration.
When you are ready to generate work orders, you can explicitly type in a date indicating the period for which you want work orders. This makes it easy to deal with special cases. For example, you might want to generate work orders weekly for most of the year, but close to vacations and holidays, you might need to set up schedules further in advance. Therefore, you can set the default to be every seven days, but change things "on the fly" when necessary.

To generate work orders, select Work Orders —> Generate Work Orders from the menu. MainBoss opens a window that contains the following:

Generate up to: Specifies a date. MainBoss will generate work orders with "Work Start" dates up to and including the specified date, beginning with the last date you generated work orders.
When MainBoss first displays the window, the date in "Generate up to" is set by default to a week after the current date. For example, suppose you generate work orders on January 1. The date in "Generate up to" will automatically be set to January 8. This lets you generate preventive maintenance work orders for the next week.
If the date shown in "Generate up to" is inappropriate, you can type in a different date. MainBoss can then generate work orders up to the date you specify.
If you want to generate work orders on a different schedule (for example, every month rather than every week), you can set a different default time interval. For further information, see the explanation of "PM Generate Frequency" in Date and Time Format and Other Preferences.

Use single Purchase Order for generate period: When a work order is generated, MainBoss checks to see if the task and/or unit has an associated prototype purchase order. If so, MainBoss automatically generates a purchase order based on that prototype. Typically, this purchase order deals with outside labor and parts associated with the work.
Now consider the situation where several of the generated work orders have associated purchase orders for materials and labor created from the same prototype. In this case, MainBoss offers you two choices: generating a separate purchase order for each work order, or combining everything from the same prototype into a single purchase order. If you checkmark Use single Purchase Order for generate period, MainBoss combines the individual work orders into a single purchase order; otherwise, it generates a separate purchase order for each job.
As an example, suppose that MainBoss generates five new work orders: three that use the same prototype purchase order and two that use different prototypes. If Use single Purchase Order for generate period is not checkmarked, MainBoss will generate five separate purchase orders, one corresponding to each work order. If Use single Purchase Order for generate period is checkmarked, MainBoss generates three purchase orders: a single one for the first three jobs, and two separate ones for the remaining two jobs.
Create Closed Purchase Orders: If this is checkmarked, MainBoss automatically closes any purchase orders that are created when work orders are generated. This saves you the trouble of closing the purchase orders manually in situations where expenditures are routine.
For example, suppose that all of your standard preventive maintenance procedures have had their expenses pre-approved by management and that the outside costs are fixed by service agreements. In this case, you may decide there's no reason to examine the purchase orders, print them off, send them to the vendor, and so on; you can save all that work by closing the purchase orders as soon as they are created. On the other hand, if some of the purchase orders that are generated may need management approval or the costs may need to be adjusted in some way, then it's best not to checkmark Create Closed Purchase Orders. The purchase orders will be created and left open, to make it easier for you to recognize them later on.
Preview: Displays summaries of the work orders that MainBoss intends to generate. To create this preview, MainBoss must calculate which jobs must be done; however, MainBoss does not necessarily create the work orders or add them to the list of jobs to be done.
For more information on the display produced by Preview, see Previewing Generated Work Orders.
Report: Produces a report about the work orders that will be generated. The report contains similar information to what you see with Preview, but in an easier-to-read form. For details, see The Generated Work Order Report.

Important: Until you gain experience with how MainBoss generates work orders based on the schedules you create, you should use Preview or Report to examine the work orders before you actually generate them. If you are expecting a work order for a particular unit and it doesn't appear in the preview or report, you can cancel the work order generation and check the schedule for the unit before proceeding. This will let you make sure that the schedule you have specified is actually what you want. Once you press Generate to generate work orders, there is no going back.

Generate: Clicking Generate tells MainBoss to go ahead and generate the work orders in full. The new work orders are added to the list of existing work orders, and can be examined or edited with the Work Order browser.
Cancel: Closes the window without generating any work orders.

Note: When you click Preview, Report or Generate, MainBoss must scan its database to determine which preventive maintenance tasks have come due. Depending on the size of your database and the number of tasks, this process may take a noticeable amount of time. MainBoss therefore displays a "progress indicator" in the middle part of the window to show that it's working.

When you generate work orders, the creation date for those work orders will be the current date and time (the date and time that you click Generate, telling MainBoss to generate the work orders). The creation date is not the date specified in "Generate up to" unless that happens to be the current date and time.

For general information on work orders, see Work Orders. For browsing work orders, see Browsing Work Orders. For editing work orders, see Creating and Editing Work Orders.